The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XXXIV

Dated: 27th Apr. 2008

The Publisher’s Post is a weekly newsletter that contains information relating to the book publishing and book selling industry in India.

News This Week

Reading undergoes a digital makeover
Source: The Times of India

The book reading habit is undergoing a technology revolution they’re doing away the books and the reading. Books today can be downloaded on to your laptop, bought on audio CDs or loaded on your iPod.

“Abroad, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader are very popular and you see people turning pages on them while travelling or while commuting. In India, these products are yet to hit the market. Audio books are more popular here,” says Himanshu Chakrawarti, COO of Landmark Book Stores.

“In developed markets, audio books are exceedingly popular across age groups. If it’s used as a phonetic support for children, the tech-savvy younger generation listens to it on their iPods or car stereo and the older generation uses audio books as a substitute for the real thing given their failing eyesight. In India audio books are catching on, especially in the children’s and non-fiction category. Corporate executives like to listen to management books on the go,” says C B Navalkar, CEO of Crossword Bookstores.

Audio books form less than 1% of the books in stores today, but experts say the numbers will rise rapidly, once Indian stores can get their distribution channels and importers in place. “The price of audio books starts at Rs 300 and climbs depending on the title and the country from which they are imported,” says Chakrawarti. “One needs to be careful not just about the title, but also the voice-over of the narrator. A drab voice can kill the excitement of a book.”

Penguin Books in the UK recently announced that they were looking to release all new titles in both paper and digital formats. They are also digitising existing titles rapidly.

Amazon, which is known for its exhaustive list of books, is also vying to be the best place for e-books. At Amazon’s Kindle store, there are thousands of titles at or under a dollar.

Apple gives you the option of purchasing books directly from iTunes or importing audio books on to iTunes before loading it on to your iPod. But despite the popularity of technology with the gadget-crazy new generation, there’s nothing quite like curling up with a book. “A book has its own charm and that’s something technology cannot challenge. Despite the rise of digital or audio formats, book sales will not decline in a long time to come,” says Navalkar.

Publishers go blog-hunting for content
Source: DNA, Mumbai

A visit to the vegetable mandi brought home a strange cucumber that bore an uncanny resemblance to the letters ‘Om’ in Sanskrit. And the family that bought it thinks there’s a divine intervention at work. Within minutes, there is chaos ruling. Neighbours come rushing in and so do print media and news channels.

Such a cock-eyed and fictional look at a “holy” incident that happened with a middle-class family in Mumbai has got blogger B. Keshav stand a chance to get his story featured in Penguin India’s compilation of short stories from the web — Blogprints.

Many publishers like Penguin are going online to gather material for their publications. Meaning, they are picking up outstanding creative blog posts, be it short stories or poetry, and putting it together into a book.

Small wonder, the trend has got the unsung creative talents like Keshav and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan much excited.

“It’s a reason enough for me to keep my blog updated with the best short stories. Sulekha.com will soon be choosing one author per month from its vast set of bloggers for publishing their work,” says Keshav.

But with thousands of posts and creative talents on the net, its not easy for the publishers to sift through hundreds of the posts to pick out the best of works. So, they have devised strategies like online creative contests to find fresh talents.

Apeejay Group’s Oxford chain of bookstores has been running e-Author since last five years. The online short-story contest, which invites entries from aspiring writers, has roped in publishers Harper Collins and Readers’ Digest this year to partner in the hunt for new and emerging talents by going through the web route.

The short stories would be subsequently published in Reader’s Digest and the winning novel would be published by Harper Collins with Oxford retaining the IP for two years.

However, opening of the floodgates has its cons too. V. Karthika, editor-in-chief, Harper Collins India, says, “You have 20-somethings writing on blogs and sending their transcripts to publishers. The approach sometimes is very amateurish and one ends up sifting through a lot more work than one would really be required to.”

Fact and Fiction
Source: The Telegraph, Calcutta

About 20 bookstores are scheduled to open in Calcutta over the next two years. Books, you would think, are alive and kicking in this city, at times annoyingly boastful — to outsiders — of its culture.

Crossword and Starmark, already in town, are expanding. Books & Beyond, newly arrived, hopes to spread beyond its sole presence at South City mall. Oxford, which has been in town the longest and hadn’t thought out-of-Park Street until recently, has pitched camp in Sarat Bose Road.

Ever mindful of culture — but lately busy chasing business, though not so busy as not to try and pull the Book Fair back to the Maidan every sooty winter — Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will be happy to know that even after all the malls there’s still space for bookstores.

Some would say, however, that a city that had no bookstore worth the name till recently for all its cultural pretensions and has but a handful now could do with a few more.

Or could it?

The numbers don’t suggest so. The East, where Calcutta is the biggest market, has a share of just 10 per cent of national sales of English books. Equality exists beyond the pale of Marxist rule: among the North, West and the South, each with a 30 per cent slice of the Rs 1,000-crore national market.

Calcutta’s apparent reputation as a city of book lovers doesn’t square with cold sales figures. For more, click here

New study says book production is getting greener
Source: livemint.com

The latest report about the publishing industry does not compile sales figures, track the market for fiction or lament the future of reading. It does tell a great deal about books, not what they say, but what they are made of.

“Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts” is an 86-page summary, printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.5 million metric tons of paper each year, is steadily, if not entirely, finding ways to make production greener.

There is great support in theory for going greener, but results are uneven. Just over half of publishers, for instance, have set specific goals for increasing use of recycled paper. About 60% have a formal environmental policy or are in the process of completing one.

Virtually all of the major publishers have taken some steps, from Hyperion switching to soy-based ink, to Penguin Group (USA) using wind power, to Scholastic, Inc. printing the deluxe edition of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” on 100 percent post-consumer waste fiber. Simon & Schuster and the Hachette Book Group USA are among those using e-book readers instead of paper manuscripts. The Random House Publishing Group is experimenting with sending books online to media outlets.

New Book Releases & Events

Pratilipi

A new bilingual, bi-monthly ezine we happened to chance across. The “About” page reads thus:

Pratilipi is (for the time being) a completely non-commercial magazine running on the editors’ investments and on the works of likeminded contributors.

It is an ‘online’ magazine for two reasons:

1. An online magazine can be more ‘open’ in terms of eccentricities of form etc. The writers and the editors can really work and interact with a text; it can be edited and re-edited at any time; its form can change by the minute (although we do not intend to do that).

2. A printed, bound magazine needs the sort of resources that we do not (as yet) have nor do we (as yet) know the ways that lead to such resources.

Pratilipi is (wants to be) a bilingual / multilingual, multiscript magazine that provides a space for conversation / debate between diverse sorts of writing and writers.

Pratilipi forbids itself nothing – except taking on a representational role on the web or catering to such expectations – and, hopefully, never will.

Jamia Millia Islamia launches its first journal
Source: TwoCircles.net

Jamia Millia Islamia’s (JMI) first journal Third Frame: Literature, Culture and Society was launched on 25th April by Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-Chief of the Outlook Group, in a programme at JMI.

Speaking at the journal launch ceremony, Mehta said there was a need to create a space for serious, non-academic writing which could bust the universal myth that people did not want to write more than 800-word articles because no one wanted to read more than 800 words at one go. He hoped that Third Frame , targeted at the informed lay reader, would meet the requirement. Others who spoke on the occasion included Dr Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press, UK, Manas Saikia, Managing Director, Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd and Prof Mushirul Hasan (VC, JMI) and Rakhshanda Jalil (Media Coordinator, JMI), who are also joint-editors of the journal Third Frame . Cambridge University Press has published the first issue of the journal.

A press release issued by JMI said that the journal fulfils a long-felt need of the university to have a journal of its own for there has been concern that universities are, or should be, the disseminators of not just knowledge but ideas. Given its unique position in the nationalist-secular tradition of multi-cultural, pluralist India, Jamia Millia Islamia has always been a crucible for new ideas and newer ways of looking at things. It seemed in the fitness of things, therefore, for the JMI and Cambridge University Press to forge a partnership to launch a new journal, one that would be devoted to voices and concerns from the developing societies, says the release.

The journal will celebrate the diversity in terms of people’s profiles, passions and pursuits. As its sub-title indicates, Third Framewill bring together ideas and images, myths and metaphors, concepts and theories that have captured our collective consciousness and found representation in our literature, culture and society. The inaugural issue is devoted to sixty years of India’s Independence.

Blogs and Articles

It’s not you, it’s your books
Source: Indian Express

Naming a favourite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore - or a phony. But how much of all this agonising is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading Candy by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.”

More of this article here

Other Announcements

“Open Book Reviews”
Those interested may sign up for our review section where original reviews of books will be posted, details of which are available here. A database that lists all service providers is also open for those interested.

Associate Service Provider
CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Services offers partnership opportunities through their Associate Service Provider (ASP) initiative. For details, visit this page.

Organizations and Publishing Houses willing to advertise for various positions related to publishing are invited to do so in this section.
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This newsletter is developed by Queenie Fernandes and Leonard Fernandes, founders of CinnamonTeal Print & Publishing Services with inputs from various individuals, publishing houses, websites and blogs.

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